Thursday, May 7, 2009

Who Does the Environmentalist Think He Is?

In his last book the revolutionary French philosopher Felix Guattari warns us about the destruction of three ecologies, the ecologies of social, mental and environmental, by what he calls IWC (Integrated World Capitalism—I think this was a term first used by the economist Immanuel Wallerstein)

Ecologies of Social: IWC has atomized our existence and killed our social relations. We see more and more violence emerging along the lines of ethnic, religious, national, gender and sexual identities. We have globalized crime and the chickens are coming back to roost.

Ecologies of the Mental: IWC constantly invades our mental space and homogenize it by creating mass-media subjectivity. We do not know what we want unless we get a help from the ads. Even our spiritual life is in the market. From Mata to Sri Sri to Sai, spirituality is the most marketable of all commodities. Our good old friend God is transformed into a bourgeoisie trader, an individual who takes note, calculates, rewards, and punishes the believer in accordance with the solid gold of spiritual work that the believer has put in. I just don’t understand why we still cloth God in old-fashioned apparels. God must be clothed as suits a good bourgeoisie gentleman!

Ecologies of the Environmental: Plastic, toxic and atomic wastes. Natural water resources are depleted. The planet gets hotter. The ices are melting. The sea level is rising. The lands are beginning to disappear. Within two hundred years Kerala will be history and mallus will be the stuff of legends. Greenhouse effect and we cannot stand the heat. We put in place more centralized air conditioners, buy cars with air conditioners, and adorn our house with refrigerators. They dig big holes in the ozone layer. More ultraviolet rays and more heat. Zizek is no joke: the thing that causes the trouble is its own remedy. If the climate is hot, we buy air conditioners, and then they make the climate hotter, and to resist it we buy more air conditioners and and and…..

In the film about the Nobel laureate liberal gentleman (Nobel Prize for Liberal Fraudulence?), we get to know that he, unlike many other American presidential candidate, knows about Thomas Kuhn. Then he persuasively talks about the frog. You take a frog in a boiler along with the water from the pond in which it is found. You gradually increase the temperature of the boiler. Nobody jumps, nobody cries, nothing happens. The frog doesn’t make an attempt to escape. You heat up boiler and the frog will eventually die. No complaints, happy as ever. But if we use water in the boiler other than from the pond and repeat the experiment, we get a different result. The frog will immediately react. It jumps out, goes back to its pond.

Forget about the frog. Frog is not frog. The frog in the boiler with the water from the pond is MAN. We just do not notice that the temperature is rising. We have no complaints. We are happy as ever. One day, like the frog in the experiment, we will die fat.

Al Gore is a fraud. We expect some great idea from a person who has explained things this beautifully. What a pity! He ends up being another promoter of environment-friendly capitalism! Gee, these Americans know how to mindfuck others and get away with a noble prize!

So, it seems, the only people who are concerned about the catastrophe around us are the good-minded superrich, who, with their speculations throw thousands of lives into disarray, and the poets like Sugathakumari. What is so unbearable about these pious, noble creatures? Their arrogance. They shed crocodile tears about earth, air, river, mountain and all such fuck. What in effect they are concerned with is the continuation of the existence of the most criminal race on the globe, the homo sapience. But they won’t shoot it out in such simple manner. They cloth their disgusting selfishness and egoism in pious and noble causes and high-sounding, politically correct rhetorics.

They want to preserve human race. But their noble language has the arrogance of sending the image that they want to SAVE THE PLANET. What arrogance! Who do they think they are to save the planet? Does the earth want their help or is it the other way around? We must rather say plainly: ‘save the superrich’, ‘save the environmentalist’, ‘save the nature poets’.

Man is the most vulnerable of all beings. Yet man is the most arrogant of all! Man shows charity not only to fellow beings but to the ENTIRE PLANET. When does man learn the lesson taught by Stephen J. Gould and learn to be humble so as to accept the fact that man is insignificant? We must remember, not with the intention of surviving, but for the sake of remembrance only: Earth does not want man; only man wants earth. God does not create man in his image; man creates God in his image. Both in earth’s scheme of things and God’s scheme of things, MAN COULD JUST BE AN ACCIDENT.